Beauty and malevolence in Montanahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/dirt-naps-cause-insomnia
Review of ‘The Ploughmen’ by Kim Zupan.

The PloughmenKim Zupan272 pages, hardcover: $26.Henry Holt, 2014.

Valentine Millimaki has hit a stretch of bad luck as Missoula novelist Kim Zupan’s dark, lyrical debut The Ploughmen opens. Millimaki, who works for the Copper County sheriff’s department in Montana, is skilled at tracking missing people in the wilderness with his trusty German shepherd, searching for hunters, hikers and wandering children before they succumb to hypothermia. He’s known for his high rate of successes, but over the past year, he has been finding only dead bodies. Millimaki is on call whenever anyone goes missing, but as the newest member of the force, he’s also expected to work the jail’s graveyard shift.

This jeopardizes his marriage to a wife he hardly sees, and brings him into the role of a confessor for John Gload, a notorious hit man who has finally been caught.

Gload takes a shine to Millimaki, in part because they both grew up on farms, and begins to regale him with tales of his crimes during the long jailhouse nights. Millimaki’s superiors encourage the conversations, hoping to solve old cases, but even as Millimaki tries to convince himself that he’s only spending time with Gload for information, a twisted friendship blossoms between the two men. As Millimaki’s personal life continues to unravel, and he struggles with unrelenting insomnia, he finds “to his horror that he missed the old man’s company.”

Gload, with his massive hands, calm demeanor and “oddly courtly” manners, fits right into the literary tradition of the charismatic killer. He’s a smooth and steady assassin, like Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh, and can analyze and -manipulate others as easily as Thomas Harris’- Hannibal Lecter.

In The Ploughmen, Zupan, who teaches carpentry at Missoula College, explores the darkest impulses of humanity and sets them alongside the incomparable loveliness of Montana, which he conveys through densely poetic, Faulknerian prose. Millimaki himself marvels at the contrast, wondering, “what in this beautiful country could inspire such evil.”

Death and loneliness permeate the vast Western landscape, but the beauty with which Zupan describes them turns The Ploughmen into a sort of ornate requiem. “Crows and magpies swarmed the humming power lines overhead,” he writes, “awaiting the tender carrion and greeting with caws and croaks the plentitude of the refulgent day.”

When Cormac McCarthy sent an unnamed father and son out to wander a post-apocalyptic landscape in his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, he inadvertently created the template for one of contemporary fiction’s dominant themes. Among the spate of post-apocalyptic narratives that appeared in 2014 is California, the debut of Los Angeles-based writer Edan Lepucki.

Lepucki, along with other recent post-apocalyptic tour guides, echoes McCarthy on a few points: In the future, there will be no Internet, finding enough food will require constant effort, people will sift through relics of fallen civilizations for useful materials, and the roads will be beset by highwaymen. (In California, they’re called pirates.)

But while McCarthy keeps his characters in constant motion, Lepucki’s protagonists, Cal and Frida, a young married couple, are determined to find a safe place to settle down.

Through flashbacks, we learn that they fled the nightmarish Los Angeles of a few decades from now and drove into the wilderness until their car ran out of gas. Frida has a city dweller’s limited outdoor survival skills, but Cal has learned a few useful crafts like farming and carpentry. When winter closes in, they’re lucky enough to find an empty shack for shelter.

They’ve heard there are other people left in the world, some of them holed up in private enclaves rumored to enjoy electricity and other amenities, but Cal and Frida don’t encounter anyone until they meet the family who once occupied their shack, and August, a roving junk dealer who trades Frida some Vicodin for a bra, “made of fabric and wire, both valuable,” he says.

In plain, straightforward prose, Lepucki deftly notches up the tension when Frida discovers she’s pregnant and she and Cal set off into the woods hoping to find a settlement. Sometimes the characters’ motivations are murky and their beliefs confusingly mercurial, and the ending is a puzzler, but California is both diverting and thoughtful. It leaves you with the notion that maybe the post-apocalypse genre isn’t new-fangled after all, but rather a fresh reimagining of a classic Western theme: Every man for himself against nature.

]]>No publisherBooksCalifornia2015/02/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleSocial work blueshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.20/social-work-blues
Review of ‘Fourth of July Creek’ by Smith Henderson.Fourth of July CreekSmith Henderson470 pages, hardcover: $26.99.Ecco, 2014.

Fourth of July Creek, the robust debut of Portland-based novelist Smith Henderson, follows the life of Pete Snow, a state social worker in the fictional town of Tenmile, Montana. At work, Snow is steady and skillful, able to calm frightened children and parse messy domestic situations. But after hours, he’s an alcoholic prone to unbridled benders, alienated from his own land-baron dad and fugitive brother. He has lived in an isolated cabin ever since he left his cheating wife.

One day in the early 1980s, a disheveled child named Benjamin wanders into the town, west of Glacier National Park. Pete buys Benjamin new clothes and medicine for giardia and scurvy, and returns him to the remote spot the boy calls home. Benjamin’s father, Jeremiah, a wild-bearded, scripture-quoting, shotgun-toting survivalist, collects his son while threatening Pete with a “fatal wrath.” But Pete refuses to give up on this odd family, gradually befriending them as you might a pair of skittish wild animals.

Meanwhile, after Pete’s hard-partying wife moves to Texas, their 13-year-old daughter, Rachel, runs away. Pete, who blames himself for neglecting his daughter, takes off on a cross-country mission to rescue her. As he tells his estranged wife, “I take kids away from people like us.” We learn what’s happening to Rachel through question-and-answer sessions interspersed throughout the novel, in which she details all she endures as she drifts.

Fourth of July Creek is rife with painfully honest, hard-won insights about kids out on the street or caught up in the system; the author once worked at a group home for juveniles in Missoula, and his experience brings a unique authenticity to the story.

At times, the novel is so bleak that only the precision and beauty of Henderson’s language keeps you from flinching away: “Medallions from the quaking aspen lay about in a golden hoard, blowing up in parade confetti as he drove through them.” But keep reading, and you’ll find yourself caring about the wounded people who stagger through this book too much to ever want to leave them. It seems as if Henderson felt the same way — he ends the book in mid-sentence, the fate of one character not fully revealed. Expect the hosannas for this rich, heartbreaking novel to continue for years to come.

]]>No publisherBooks2014/11/24 03:05:00 GMT-7ArticleNowhere left to runhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/nowhere-left-to-run
Review of “Point of Direction” by Rachel Weaver

In Colorado writer Rachel Weaver’s exceptional debut novel, Point of Direction, Alaska drives two characters close to their psychological breaking points. Anna Richard, the book’s intriguing narrator, combines a habit of radical risk-taking with a tendency toward caution. As the book opens, Anna is hitchhiking back to Alaska after two years of drifting. She accepts a ride from a young man named Kyle, but refuses to sit in the pickup’s cab — she prefers to freeze in the back, her way of ensuring that he doesn’t bother her. When Kyle asks her what she does, she answers simply, “I move.”

They end up in a small Alaskan town, where Kyle takes fishing jobs and Anna bartends. Slowly, she begins to trust him. When the weather turns cold, they head south to Mexico, but even though they’re now deeply in love, Anna still refuses to tell him what spurred her headlong flight across the West. The next autumn, Kyle proposes they buy a $1 Coast Guard lease to live over the winter on an island lighthouse overlooking a treacherous channel. Townspeople warn them against it, and caution that the prior caretaker vanished.

Eldred Rock, Lynn Canal, Alaska.

Bob & Sandra Shanklin / The Lighthouse People

But Kyle is eager and Anna agrees, hoping solitude will help her recover from the grief connected to a glacier-hiking expedition she led in Alaska a few years earlier. As she contemplates the lighthouse, Anna thinks, “I understand on some cellular level now that this is a place where all the rules are different, that this is a place where I have not yet failed.”

One of the most appealing facets of these two characters is their extreme competence — Anna can steer a skiff through a choppy channel and run a finicky outboard motor, knows how to chop wood, catch fish, smoke salmon and prepare for winter.

Point of Direction has a gripping plot, but its chief virtue might lie in its taut language. Weaver’s prose is honed and spare enough to fit in a backpack on a cross-glacier trek. The writing is precise and crystalline, each sentence carefully composed to capture the icy tragedy at the heart of this propulsive book, the chill that’s gripped Anna ever since, and the emotions that surge when her reserve finally starts to thaw.

]]>No publisherBooks2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAn author’s West of dreams and nightmareshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.16/an-authors-west-of-dreams-and-nightmares
Malcolm Brooks mingles romanticism with pragmatic realities. Montana writer Malcolm Brooks spent part of his childhood in southern New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia, raised by a horse-loving mother who owned a huge palomino. His young parents, he says, had a “gypsy streak,” which led them to move across the country to California and then back again. Growing up, Brooks harbored the sort of cowboy dreams that seem to be strongest in those who weren’t born in the West. “All through childhood, I was enamored by the Wild West,” he says, “really interested in horses, even the Little House books.”

Brooks’ family moved to Orange County, California, when he was 10. He expected, he says, to encounter “a mythical place out of John Wayne movies. I remember being incredibly shocked that it was asphalt and concrete and subdivisions.” He decided then that if California wasn’t the “real” West, perhaps Montana would be.

Brooks’ eighth-grade teacher gave him a copy of Lonesome Dove, the book that inspired him to become a writer and further stoked his visions of an unfettered, open-range West. “I grew up in somewhat cloistered and often what in retrospect were pretty stressful circumstances,” he says, “and books were a lifeline for me, a direction for escape and, eventually, an exit strategy.” After high school in Northern California, he dropped in and out of college, learning carpentry to support himself. He didn’t settle into his studies until he was in his mid-20s, in 1995, when he moved to Missoula and earned an English degree at the University of Montana.

He had a natural flair for language and eagerly absorbed the work of contemporary Western writers: “I thought Tom McGuane was literally God, and Jim Harrison his right-hand man.” Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses “had me genuflecting, too,” he says. He read widely, thanks partly to his then-girlfriend’s job at a Missoula bookstore. “We didn’t have a television. All I did the first five years I lived in Montana was hunt, fish, read and work.”

But even Montana didn’t live up to the romantic notions he’d gathered from Field & Stream and novels like Legends of the Fall. “What I didn’t understand about Montana was how difficult it is to make a living if you’re dependent on the local economy, at least in the popular, populated mountain towns,” he says. “When I moved here, I knew McGuane had paid something like 70 bucks a month to rent a house in Livingston in the late ’60s, when he came to write and fish and hunt. I thought I was going to do the same thing, to the same extent, but that was pretty delusional.”

Brooks supported himself through remodeling work while he toiled on a manuscript for six years, and started to publish articles and stories in places like Outside and Montana Quarterly. “I’ve got four other complete novel manuscripts in addition to this that were test runs. I regard them as a part of the learning curve until I found my own voice and landed on an idea that I just felt absolutely had to go the distance.”

His first published novel, Painted Horses (Grove Press, August 2014), mingles Western romanticism with the author’s hard-earned knowledge of the region’s pragmatic realities.

In a captivating story largely set in the 1950s, Painted Horses follows Catherine, a young East Coast archaeologist hired to look for cultural artifacts whose finding might prevent the construction of a dam in a canyon near Billings that’s “fifty miles long and deeper than Satan’s own appetites,” according to one local. It soon becomes clear that the authorities don’t want her to discover anything. Catherine’s path intersects with that of Miriam, a young Crow woman, and John H., a journeyman painter, World War II veteran and horse trainer. With Miriam’s help, Catherine adapts, learning to read the land, “the most unruly, indecipherable tract of earth she’d ever seen,” much as the idealistic Brooks learned to adapt to the real-life conditions he encountered in the West.

“I wanted to write a book that had one foot firmly planted in the romantic myth of the West, but another foot in this much more complicated, much less glossy, reality of what the Western experience really was in all of its facets,” Brooks says. “The dark side of Manifest Destiny is around us everywhere, in human despair and crushed dreams and the toxic fallout even from realized dreams, on poverty-stricken reservations, in rampant diabetes, in the Berkeley Pit, in coal-bed development, in meth addiction. The West, like nature itself, has two different faces, neither of them really complete without the other.”

Hometowns Woodbury, New Jersey, (birthplace) and Placerville, California (where he went to high school)

Vocation

Writer and carpenter

Hobbies

Horses, bird dogs, hunting, fly fishing, cooking and travel.

He says

“I read a critique of Thomas McGuane that says he made every sentence a continuous burst of imagination. I realized, for me, good writing is about making each sentence glitter like its own tiny artifact.”

On creating characters very different from himself

“That old Hemingway notion that if you imagine something perfectly enough you can make it more true than if it actually happened — I relied on that as a jumpstart to give myself permission to even try it.”

In 1876, a woman named Jeanne Bonnet, who made her living catching and selling frogs to San Francisco restaurants — and was repeatedly arrested for wearing trousers in public — was shot to death. A mention of Bonnet in a book on unconventional women intrigued the Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue, author of the 2010 bestseller Room, and she’s spun the few available facts into a rollicking story of post-gold rush San Francisco.

Frog Music is told from the perspective of Bonnet’s friend, Blanche Beunon, who witnessed the murder. Blanche is a smart, resourceful woman who is a well-known burlesque dancer and high-class prostitute. In France, she performed in circuses, dazzling audiences with her equestrian act while her lover, Arthur, flew on the trapeze. But after Arthur injured his back in a fall and the Franco-Prussian War broke out, hitting Paris hard, the couple fled to California in search of better fortune.

Frog Music moves back and forth in time between the shooting of Bonnet, whom Donoghue calls Jenny, and the story of Blanche and Jenny’s friendship, which begins when Jenny, riding a pilfered high-wheeled bicycle, collides with Blanche on the street.

Jenny Bonnet is a remarkable literary creation, a fierce free spirit who “wears her bruises like parade gear” and speaks in a charming Western patois. Jenny’s probing questions about who is taking care of Blanche’s baby son lead her to retrieve the child from a horrifying childcare mill for working mothers, but she then has trouble caring for him and complains about it. “Keep him or don’t, is what I say,” Jenny tells Blanche. “Fish or cut bait, but don’t gripe.”

Jenny causes Blanche to rethink her entire way of living. After Jenny’s death, Blanche upends everything to try to catch the killer. Although Bonnet was born in France, in Donoghue’s telling she embodies the spirit of the West in the 1800s, with her disregard for conventional morality, inexhaustible gumption, and determination to pursue life according to her own template. Frog Music is a rich historical whodunit that gives readers much to relish.

In her deft debut novel, Colorado writer TaraShea Nesbit imagines the lives of the wives of the men who were stationed in New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nesbit writes in the collective voice of the women, whose physicist husbands suddenly announce, "We are going to the desert," without offering too many details. The women cannot even tell their relatives exactly where they are headed. "Our mothers understood," Nesbit writes. "Our mothers had kept great secrets."

The collective narration gives the prose an incantatory rhythm that suits the story, once the reader becomes accustomed to the frequent contradictions within a sentence: "We arrived in New Mexico and thought we had come to the end of the earth, or we thought we had come home." Out of the threads of each woman's experiences a tapestry is woven, revealing a peculiar, complex and yet temporary society.

The families are assigned houses inside a fenced complex patrolled by Dobermans and mounted guards. "We handed over our cameras. We denied we kept a diary." The women know their scientist husbands are engaged in a secret war project, but most have no idea what is really going on.

Since the wives can't share their lives with people outside the compound, they confide in each other and form a lively society, throwing cocktail parties, swapping clothes and minding each other's children. "The military officially ran the town in one way," Nesbit writes, "and our husbands in practice ran the town in some ways, and we ran the town clandestinely in others."

The suspense for the reader comes from wondering how much the women know about their husbands' work, and what they think about it. The answer varies for each of them, but none of them knows the complete truth until they see the devastation the atom bomb inflicts on Japan. The aftermath leaves them all deeply affected, even as their trajectories splinter from collective to individual again. Some decide the U.S. was justified in using the bombs; others, horrified by the unprecedented destruction, want to dedicate their lives to limiting nuclear weapons. In the end, all of them are bound by the part they played in the atom bomb's creation.

Sid Dulaney leaves his cheating girlfriend behind in Massachusetts and returns home to Tucson in Sunland, Oregon writer Don Waters' hilarious first novel. Sid had worked as an itinerant teacher, but finds himself jobless in Tucson, where he spends his time looking after his beloved grandmother, Nana. He starts crossing the border to buy 88-year-old Nana's medications more cheaply in Mexico. When Nana's fellow residents at the Paseo del Sol retirement community ask him to do the same for them, he becomes a prescription drug runner for grateful senior citizens.

"At first," Sid explains, "I had trouble accepting the little amounts people could pay me for delivering drugs. My problem was that I liked these old folks too much. I liked their unending kindness, their teary eyes, and their crazy fashion sensibilities. … Very few people had the time to sit down, prepare a pot of tea, and talk to you, and care about you, truly care, but these people did."

Despite the savings on prescriptions, Nana's finances dwindle, and so Sid turns to increasingly desperate measures to keep her at Paseo del Sol. He learns he's being followed by the henchman of a Mexican drug lord, who wants kickbacks, and begins to romance a beautiful social worker at Paseo del Sol, their relationship kicking off to a hysterical start at an adults-only "Animal Amore" tour of the zoo. These elements come to a comic boil as Sid, determined to make one last score, agrees to transport a migrant over the border. His charge, however, turns out to belong to a different species than expected.

In taut, inventive prose, Waters, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, captures the rhythms of life along the border. A newspaper reporter is described as "a typical borderlander, all tendon and grit"; the public art in a Mexican town reveals "a culture replete with mythos," while a votive candle shrine brings out "the usual suspects: Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe." And Sid takes time to appreciate the desert landscape: "It was an amazing, clear, moon-rippled night. It hurt my chest and head thinking on it, about us, our placement in the grand order. Everything was just stars and dust." Sunland is one part farce and one part soulful examination of love, friendship, mortality and Arizona living.

"The land was hard on its sons, harder yet on the sons of other lands," writes

Philipp Meyer in The Son, a masterful, gripping portrait of America's Western expansion told through the lives of one Texas family.

The Son braids together the stories of three members of the McCullough family, who first came to Texas in 1832 when it was still part of Mexico. The future patriarch of the family is the charming and canny Eli McCullough, eventually known simply as "the Colonel," who was born in 1836, the year Texas became an independent republic.

When Eli is 13, Comanches kidnap him, killing his mother and siblings. Eli's toughness impresses his captors, who adopt him into the tribe. The Comanche sections are rigorously researched – the author drank buffalo blood and tanned hides – and vividly rendered, and they form the heart of the book. Although the Comanches are often shown to be merciless, Meyer reveals the grace and humanity of this horse-centered culture, and we mourn along with Eli when they dwindle.

Meyer weaves in excerpts from the diaries of Peter McCullough, Eli's son, uneasy with the ruthlessness that surrounds him. "How two men from the same stock might be so different," Peter muses, "my father likely reckons my mother snuck off for congress with some poet, scrivener, or other nearsighted sniveling half-man." In 1915, Peter's son, Glenn, is shot and wounded, and the perpetrator is believed to be a member of the Garcia family, the neighboring landowners. Back then, Texans were willing to kill Mexicans with little provocation, and the community's revenge is swift and disproportionate.

The third narrative strand that brings the epic to the present day is that of Jeanne Anne, who takes after her great-grandfather, Eli, in her toughness and practicality and becomes the proprietor of the McCullough land, cattle and oil holdings. She muses about the character of the new generation; Eli, she thinks, had "provided for all of them, and they'd become soft, they'd become people he never would have respected."

Meyer captures the inner lives of these characters while stripping the romance from the standard Western narrative. He portrays Texas as a place of Hobbesian mayhem, where life is often nasty, brutish and short, but even something as violent as a Comanche raid has a kind of unforgettable, bloody beauty.

Ex-Red Sox pitcher Pete Hurley comes to Bozeman to start a new life after a series of tragic mishaps that left him publicly shamed in Massachusetts. "Just as I was about to get over the incident that ended my baseball career," he explains, "a drunken accident left this young girl paralyzed, and I was in the news again." He moves to Montana to live near his sister, Danielle, the only surviving member of his immediate family, and to learn how to build a house.

The gradual cracking of Pete's limited awareness is the primary thrust of High and Inside, Russell Rowland's new novel. Pete, who narrates the story, thinks he suffers from bad luck, but his friends know better, and the reader realizes it as well in the first chapter, when Danielle tells him, "Please try not to drink too much while you're here."

But Pete can't stay out of trouble. On his first day in Bozeman, he goes to a sports bar with his brother-in-law, Barry, guzzles beer and gets into a brawl with Clint, an aggressive, alcoholic behemoth. Unfortunately, Clint is also the president of the local chapter of the American Society of Construction Engineers, and after the confrontation he's determined to create permit problems for Pete's house-building project.

Each chapter opens with a quote from a fictional source, either a baseball blog or a new-agey home-building guide called Your House, Your Self. These epigraphs help reveal the details and repercussions of the infamous pitch that ended both Hurley's baseball career and that of the promising batter he hit. But High and Inside is less about baseball than it is about how fame turned Pete into someone who may never have had to pay his own bar bill or go home alone, yet could never hide from the enemies he recklessly made.

For a novel that evokes the wide-open spaces – both baseball and Montana – High and Inside is a largely interior book, focused on the relationships that Pete must analyze, repair, or relinquish entirely as he gradually comes to acknowledge his alcoholism. Perhaps the most touching relationship is that between Pete and his three-legged female dog, Dave, whom he loves but cannot care for properly as his drinking intensifies.

High and Inside is a contemplative look at what happens to one of the boys of summer when autumn comes at last.

Thompson Grey abandons his Indiana farm in 1858 and joins a caravan of pioneers trekking west along the Santa Fe Trail in Gary Schanbacher's accomplished new novel. Crossing Purgatory is a moral Western that questions what any decent human being owes another amid the harsh conditions of the American frontier.

Thompson's wife and sons died of diphtheria while he was away on a fruitless mission to seek an advance on his inheritance, and he plunges into deep mourning, blaming himself for being absent when his family became ill.

In grief and guilt, he tramps west, a man with his "spirit out of fix," and with no plan in mind until he encounters a caravan led by Captain Upperdine, a shrewd businessman who guides groups of potential settlers across pioneer trails and trades with Indians, homesteaders and prospectors along the way. Upperdine sees the taciturn wanderer as an asset, a competent and honorable man who can assist his current group of travelers.

When violence strikes along the trail, Thompson feels responsible for the pregnant wife and teenage son that the murdered man leaves behind. The one-time farmer, in his harrowing grief, would rather drift across the prairie like a tumbleweed, but that kind of behavior is not in his nature. He painstakingly fulfills both real and self-imposed obligations, and as a natural farmer, can't shake his dream for his own land, a yearning that sometimes leads him to act in unexpectedly rash ways.

When the group arrives at Upperdine's homestead north of New Mexico near the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatoire rivers, Thompson settles in to help the folks he met on the trail, as well as the family of Benito Ibarra, Upperdine's brother-in-law. At this point, Schanbacher switches to Benito's perspective, hinting that Thompson may not be as pure in his aims as he appears. "Is this a place of banishment or of second chances?" Benito wonders when he looks at the land they now farm together.

Through clear, lyrical prose, and convincing historical detail, Schanbacher examines the moral dilemmas facing Thompson and Benito, men trying to lead upright and useful lives in a place ruled by lawlessness and the punishing caprices of nature. Crossing Purgatory is an especially thoughtful frontier story that will leave readers thinking about its characters long after the final page.

Shawn Vestal sets the stories in his focused yet far-reaching debut collection among regular Mormon folks who live in Idaho, touching on their lives in the past, the present and even the afterworld. Most of his characters have fallen away from their faith or are struggling with doubts, and Vestal, a columnist for Spokane's Spokesman-Review, skillfully mixes those serious subjects with dry humor.

In one story, the narrator meets his ex-wife in the afterlife. "Are the kids all right?" he asks her. "You got used to not knowing that," she replies. "Come on," the narrator says, "I've been dead." In another story, a man travels with his girlfriend to Rupert, Idaho, to visit her Mormon parents. There, they find "a hand-painted sign, done up with curlicues: FAMILIES ARE FOREVER! Which sounded like a threat."

Although Vestal can also craft compelling stories in the vein of straightforward realism -- "About as Fast as This Car Will Go," for example, follows a young man's descent into criminality under the guidance of his ex-con father -- his stories soar when he frees them from the normal cosmic rules.

In "The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death," there's not much for the deceased to do but relive their own lives. "Now that it's gone, your life is the only thing you have left. Ransack it, top to bottom. Find whatever you can in there, because it's all there is." This story starts out comical but becomes increasingly moving and melancholy as the narrator tries to reconnect with people from his past.

The harrowing "Opposition in All Things" proposes a different possibility for the afterlife. A crusty 1880s Idaho pioneer wakes from his death to find his spirit possessing Rulon Warren, a World War I veteran having difficulty meeting the expectations of his small Mormon town. Rulon's bored possessor urges him to more or less re-enact the pioneer's own life, ultimately behaving like a lunatic, with violent repercussions.

In whatever century these stories are set, they are united in their emphasis on family, and in their exploration of what we owe to and can expect from the people who share our blood, in this life and beyond.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesIdahoBooks2013/10/14 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA California essayist on American optimism and how landscape shapes our imaginationshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.16/a-california-essayist-talks-about-american-optimism-john-muir-and-how-landscape-shapes-our-imagination
An interview with Richard Rodriguez. Richard Rodriguez grew up with Mexican immigrant parents, "a scholarship boy in Sacramento." His new book, Darling: A Spiritual Biography (Viking, October) is dedicated to the Sisters of Mercy nuns who taught him to speak English. Rodriguez's autobiographical essay collections include Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, and Brown: The Last Discovery of America. "I'm not interested in writing a memoir to tell you what I did that year," he says. "I'm interested always in writing a biography of my ideas, of how I came to think about those things." In Darling, Rodriguez examines his faith, particularly what it means that three of the world's major religions were founded in the desert. At the same time, he ponders the state of American consciousness today, looking at Las Vegas, Nev., California and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. HCN contributor Jenny Shank recently spoke with Rodriguez from his home in San Francisco; the interview has been edited and condensed.

High Country News One of the main themes of Darling is the idea that Christianity is "a desert religion," as are Judaism and Islam. Can deserts today, especially those in the American West, contribute to one's faith in these desert religions?

Richard Rodriguez A lot of the things we think about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God come out of the fact that the Israelites experienced a very specific ecology. The God who came to them was a desert God. One of the most important desert cities in the American West is Las Vegas. Las Vegas seems to represent a particular anxiety we feel in this landscape. This is not a landscape to which we feel immediately welcomed.

We have learned, in desert cities like Phoenix, to insist on the desert's sky by denying the desert's terrain. So we plant gardens that are not appropriate, we water the desert. In Las Vegas, there's this fantasy, this architectural idea of the denial of the desert: If the desert is flat, you build these shapes into the sky; if the desert is by definition emptiness, then you can fill it with toys. You can fill it with the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower or with golf courses.

I find Death Valley to be one of the most beautiful environments in the world, but it is really scary to hike around Death Valley. What everyone says about the desert, "Well, there's plenty of life in the desert," is also true, but we have to say that while coating ourselves with sunblock. The desert threatens us.

HCN I've never been to Las Vegas. I've been avoiding it.

RR I'm going to send you there! You have to go to Las Vegas. If you really love nature, you have to go there to see how frightened we are of nature; it's one of the reasons we light up the night in Las Vegas. Nature is no easy thing to live with.

HCN You discuss the contrast between Mexican "stoicism" and American "optimism" that plays into the conflict over our mutual border. Would an understanding of our countries' differences in outlook ease tensions?

RR What Mexico knows is the suffering of life. It's a culture based on that notion that to live is to suffer and to endure. Bravery is the virtue, not winning.

People come into the United States illegally because there's no food for the family or their mother needs an operation. There is a sense of obligation to other people. It's very rare to find somebody just coming on his own. Mexicans come searching for an American dream that has exhausted itself in the American consciousness. You meet optimism coming across the border from the South, from a tragic culture, at the same time that the optimistic culture of America seems to be in a kind of dejection or despair. That's the paradox of our border for me. The peasant is optimistic, and those who are guarding themselves against the peasant tend to be afraid. The collision between these two impulses is really strong.

No one is talking about the human drama playing out on the border, on that extraordinary landscape. At the very time when China has turned its wall into a tourist attraction and the Chinese are everywhere in the world, America builds a wall against the future. That should tell you a great deal about how it is with us right now.

----

HCN You write, "The traditional task of the writer in California has been to write about what it means to be human in a place advertised as paradise." As a Californian, is this a subject that has been important in your writing?

RR Oh, yes. In California, the sense of disappointment is very large around me, partly because the state changes so much. It's rather like Colorado in that sense. I remember when the Front Range was emptier, without suburban development. If you're past 30, you remember a completely different landscape.

There's this sense of disappointment that California was never what it advertised itself to be. In the early 20th century, when Los Angeles real estate interests began to advertise this ideal landscape and weather, people came out from New Jersey and Nebraska -- and then it became so crowded that they ended up on a freeway that wasn't moving.

But in some ways I'm optimistic about California because it's filling with people who came here from a different direction, from the South, people for whom California is not the West but El Norte. The West was always -- as defined by people from the East Coast -- an unraveling of history. You could find yourself alone in the West; you could be free of the confinements of the East by going West.

People who come to El Norte tend to go to cities, because that's where the jobs are. They tend to see the landscape between the South and the North as continuous. People, on the other hand, who come to California from Asia are seeing California as the beginning, not the end. So they are without that pessimism that has defined us in California -- people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge because there's no farther to go, we have reached the end of America. Asians say this is where America begins.

HCN How does the landscape in which a person lives affect his or her viewpoint?

RR For all of our talk about environmentalism, it's amazing how little we talk about landscape and how it informs our imagination. When you and I talk of the West, there are millions of people in California for whom this is not the West. My mother used to call California "El Norte," and I hated it because I wanted to live in California with cowboys. That was really glamorous. When she was talking about people coming to El Norte to get these jobs picking peaches, it wasn't glamorous at all to me. They didn't ride a horse, they were really poor and they spent their last bet on the ground.

Probably the most important consciousness of the West belongs to John Muir. Muir was from Scotland, and he describes California as the other side of the mountain. In some sense that's an East Coast vision of California. But in fact Muir came to California from the water as an Asian would, from the sea. He found in (the state) this beginning, but he also knew that it was limited. So he begins to sound this notion that we have to protect the land because it's finite. The environmental movement did not begin to talk about preserving America in the crowded brick cities of the East Coast. That begins in places like the forests of California, where people realize that in order to have it for another generation you need to protect it. It's the great gift of people like Muir to realize that there is a continent that comes to an end; there is a landscape of our imagination.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesImmigrationProfiles2013/09/26 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe 'wrong kind of Indians'http://www.hcn.org/issues/45.16/the-wrong-kind-of-indians
A book review of Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigleyCowboys and East IndiansNina McConigley195 pages, softcover: $15.95.FiveChapters Books, 2013.

In her captivating debut story collection, Casper-raised author Nina McConigley examines with wit and empathy what it means to be "the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming." Although prejudice and ignorance surface, there are few bad guys in this game of cowboys and Indians, only complicated human beings.

The characters in Cowboys and East Indians must explain themselves frequently -- they are never quite what those who encounter them expect. In the story "Dot or Feather," a foreign exchange student from India tells a Wyoming kid dressed up as a Native American, "There are two kinds of Indians. Some wear dots, others wear feathers. You're a feather Indian. I wear a dot."

A gnawing sense of never-belonging troubles many of McConigley's characters. In the title story, Faith Henderson, a "dot Indian" adopted at age 2, remembers how she and an Arapaho classmate, the only other non-white student at her school, took turns portraying Mary "in various school Christmas pageants, since Mary was Middle Eastern." While attending college in Laramie, Faith tries to befriend a group of East Indian graduate students, hoping they will invite her to share their lives and culture. Instead, they take advantage of her, asking her to drive them places in her minivan. In the delightful, surprising "Pomp and Circumstances," Chitra is an Indian immigrant whose husband's job brings them to Casper. At an office Christmas party, she tells an anecdote about a "hijra," a traditional Indian transvestite, and soon her husband's boss, Richard Larson, invites her for tea with his wife. While there, Richard asks if she can help him try on a sari, and introduces Chitra to his elaborate cross-dressing wardrobe hidden in his gun locker. A weird and wonderful secret understanding develops between the three people. "It is unspoken between them," McConigley writes. "This kind of thing can get you killed in Wyoming."

But despite Wyoming's harsh social rules, abundant oil derricks, and scrappy towns that aren't "the West people were expecting," the characters in Cowboys and East Indians love their state, and its wildlife and landscape color the way they experience the world. These people are as skinny as a "lodgepole pine" or as unpredictable as a prairie dog poised on the edge of the highway -- and they belong to Wyoming. As in all great fiction, McConigley has delved into the particular and emerged with genuine stories that touch the universal.